This has happened to me 3 times on 2 separate computers. Something happens (I don't know what yet) and Windows stops booting properly. It gets past the BIOS boot screen, the screen goes light blue (like the default background, but with no mouse pointer), it sits there "ticking" (possibly hard disk access) for a minute and then shuts itself down.
It does this no matter how many times I try to boot the system, so I'm unable to enter recovery by failing to boot 2 times (nor any other method that I have found). There is absolutely zero diagnostic information, no text on the screen, nothing.
The first 2 times, I "fixed" it by reinstalling the OS, as that seemed to be the only thing that worked (at the cost of losing all data from the system).
Just now I managed to accidentally "fix" it by booting a Windows 11 installer USB stick. I chose to reinstall Windows, hoping to resize the current partition and install the OS on a new rescue partition, but I could not resize it and gave up and closed the installer window (without selecting a partition to install onto). That rebooted the system, and the problem was then miraculously fixed. I'm not aware that I made any changes to the system at all, and I didn't choose the Recovery option from the installer at any point.
The only thing I can think of is that perhaps the blue screen is itself the recovery system, trying and failing to start. Because it never starts successfully, it never clears the recovery flag and on the next boot it does the same thing again. Perhaps the installer cleared the recovery flag by itself? If/when this happens again, I can perhaps test this by booting the installer and running a command like this:
bcdedit /set {current} recoveryenabled no
However that still requires me to keep bootable Windows 11 media available at all times. My questions are:
- Does this situation have a name? If I search for "blue screen boot failure", most of what I find is about BSODs, which (I think) this isn't.
- What is actually happening here? What could be the cause and how could I have diagnosed it (what should I do next time it happens)? I have a feeling it might be a bad driver update, but the complete unusability of the system feels like a (near) fatal overreaction.
- What else could I try to enter recovery (or perhaps safe mode), since 5 boot failures doesn't work?
- Can I create a boot option with
bcdeditthat boots from the OS recovery partition (and if so, how)?
I think that I could use a Linux SystemRescue or GParted live CD to resize the OS main partition and install another copy of Windows as a rescue OS (which lets me run bcdedit and SFC), but that seems like a waste of disk space when there's already a recovery partition (of some kind) on the disk.
